Why Migrate and Close Your Shared Network Folders/Files? Part 1

As companies begin to be more cloud-based with cloud file sharing and collaboration applications like Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, and SharePoint, companies may still retain their original server-based network file shares, sometimes referred to as the “Z” or “O” drive. Since these servers are “sunk” cost items, you may feel that they are not costing you to keep them and there is a lot of “content” residing on basically “free” servers.

Let’s work through this:

1.    The servers, whether in-house or at a 3rd party server farm are still costing you for the server maintenance and software updates, associated fees, and IT personnel if in-house.

2.    Content will continue to build on these servers, and you may be adding capacity over time at some dollar amount.

3.    Shared Network Drives are “typically” not managed and usually treated by users as another “personal” drive or by a department as their dumping ground. Some departments, like accounting, may have a highly organized and structure drive, but this is more of an anomaly than the norm. Users will spend a lot of time trying to find the right content.

4.    Users and departments tend to create folder/subfolders, sometime 10 or more deep, as a navigation schema. Quite often these folder/subfolders become quite unwieldy due their size and subjective naming schema. Searching a shared network server is limited at best because of the lack of metadata and filters How much is it costing you to search these files?

5.    Along with creating nested folders, users want to “protect” their content by creating special security groups or adding passwords to their files. This can be a nightmare when someone leaves and you need to see that person’s files……….first you may not even see who owns that subfolder and you have to go to the Admin group and request a change of ownership. Once the folder is accessible, there may many nested folders that need sorting through in order to determine it the content should be kept or deleted. Time and cost can be large depending on the size of the shared network drives and how long they have been in operation.

6. Speaking of users leaving, when a user leaves a company, the user's content typically is not deleted so over time we have a build up of "dead" content that no one takes responsibility for and no one manages it. This is especially true when the department the user was in is merged with another department or the department is disbanded. Who becomes responsible for the content?

This is a multipart series about shutting down your shared network drives and migrating content to an appropriate repository.